About Temi Wynston Edun

Discovery

Temi Wynston Edun is a figurative painter living and working in Columbia, Maryland. Born in Ibadan, Nigeria, Edun’s practice centers on the figure as a site of psychological presence and restraint. His paintings engage silence, opacity, and interiority as structural elements rather than narrative devices.

Working primarily in oil stick on canvas, Edun employs a complex process of layering, scratching, and scraping to build intensely worked and mottled surfaces through compression, density, and erasure. Figures are often isolated within spare or abstract fields, where posture, gaze, and partial address register interior states without resolution. His work resists illustrative portraiture, favoring sustained looking and withheld meaning.

Edun earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts with honors from the University of Benin, Nigeria, in 1984. A large-scale metal sculpture completed during his studies remains installed on the university campus. After exhibiting in Benin City and Lagos, he relocated to the United States in 1987, where he worked and studied under Baltimore-based artist Larry “Poncho” Brown from 1990 to 1993.

His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including in London (2021) and Paris (2022), and has been featured in New American Paintings (Issue 166). Edun has completed commissions for cultural institutions, including the DC Black Repertory Company. He is a member of the Maryland Federation of Art and is actively engaged in arts education within his community.

My paintings explore silence as a structural condition of human presence. Working primarily with oil stick on canvas, I construct figures of black people that exist in states of psychological interiority; composed, restrained, and often withholding clear narrative resolution. Rather than depicting events, the work attends to posture, gaze, and the subtle architecture of the body as a site of thought.

The figures that emerge are neither portraits nor characters in the traditional sense. They function more as vessels of awareness, bodies that hold tension, reflection, and unresolved meaning. A tilt of the head, a weighted torso, or the direction of a gaze becomes a kind of language through which the paintings operate. In this way, silence is not absence but a structural presence: a space where perception, memory, and consciousness settle into form.

Color and surface play an important role in shaping this psychological atmosphere. Fields of muted blues, ochres, whites, and blacks establish environments that feel suspended between clarity and opacity. The material directness of oil stick allows marks to remain visible, reinforcing the sense that these figures are constructed through accumulation and restraint rather than resolution.

While the work is grounded in contemporary figurative painting, it also draws from broader traditions of symbolic presence: particularly the centrality of the head and posture found in classical African sculpture, where the body operates as both physical and metaphysical structure.

Ultimately, the paintings invite a slower form of looking. They resist immediate explanation in favor of a sustained encounter with stillness, ambiguity, and the quiet gravity of being.

curriculum vitae

b. 1964, Ibadan, Nigeria

Lives and works in Maryland, USA

EDUCATION

1984 BFA, University of Benin, Benin City, Nigeria

EXHIBITIONS

2026

Within Reach of Silence (Solo Exhibition) Gallery Blue Door, Baltimore MD

2025

Simply Blacktastic, Sebrof-Forbes Cultural Art Center, Kensington MD

2024

28th Annual No Dead Artists International Juried Exhibition of Contemporary Art. Ferrara Showman Gallery, New Orleans LA

Night Swimming, Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston, MA

2022

Strokes of Genius, Circle Gallery, Annapolis, MD

Being Seen, TAG Gallery, Frederick, MD

My Profile, The Koppel Project, Mayfair, London UK

Human Faces, Las Laguna Art Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

AKAA, Cateau du Tempe, Paris France

2021

Cladogram, Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY

Springing Forward, Create Magazine, Virtual Exhibition

Good Bones, I Like Your Work, Virtual Exhibition

2020

Bethesda Painting Awards, Gallery B, Bethesda, MD

Woman 2020, Circle Gallery, Annapolis, MD

2018

African Kaleidoscope, Serengeti Gallery, Washington, DC

SELECTED COLLECTIONS

Beth Rudin DeWoody, The Bunker Artspace, Palm Beach, Florida

Robert Hooks, Los Angeles CA

Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY

The Swahili Village, Washington, DC, New York, New Jersey

Dress Up, Basel, Switzerland

PUBLICATIONS AND AWARDS

https://bmoreart.com/2026/04/the-container-and-reach-of-silence-a-conversation-with-temi-edun.html

Black Art & Design - 2026

https:/www.blackartanddesign.com/artists/temi-wynston-edun

The Baltimore Times - 2026

https:/www.baltimoretimes-online.com/arts-culture/2026/01/13/temi-wynston-edun-transforms-silence-into-art-in-his-first-u-s-solo-exhibition/

New American Paintings -2023

LEDA Summit on Race and Inclusion; – Rehumanizing the Black Countenance – Artist Talk 2021

The Washington Post – October 2022

Bethesda Painting Awards – 2020

About

Artist Statement